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Session Submission Summary

Educating for the 21st century: experiences from the regional education learning initiative in East Africa

Wed, April 17, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Golden Gate

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The complexity of educating children for the 21st century has been widely acknowledged. This complexity has been conceptualized from the dimensions of the emergent value of soft skills and other transferrable skills in driving the world of work, the rapidly-changing profile of jobs driven by technology (especially increased automation of routine tasks) and access to information, the growing competition that has added premium to creativity and innovation, and the general evolution of pedagogy, severely altering the traditional instructional science that placed the teacher at center-stage.
The need for reconceptualizing the knowledge, skills and attitudes that should be mediated in today’s education has been heavily felt in Sub-Sahara Africa. Subsequently, many countries have over the last two decades invested in recognizing, defining and including life skills in national curricula. It must be understood however that the term ‘life skills’ in East Africa denotes the wide range of non-academic and non-technical skills that children require to navigate work and life spaces. As such, this understanding of life skills refers to what others prefer as soft skills, 21st Century skills, transferrable skills or even transversal skills.
In 2017, the Regional Education Learning Initiative (RELI) was founded, bringing together more than 60 civil society organizations from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Among the objectives of RELI was the sustained exchange of information, and learning from interventions for improved prospects of supporting the achievement of SDG 4 in the countries.

The Values and Life Skills thematic cluster identified the three problems to work on and learn from. First was the question of promoting local understanding and conceptualization of the values and life skills by modern working and living in East Africa, mapping, analyzing and prioritizing the skills, and suggesting skill frameworks for the education systems. Second was the aspect of developing and experimenting methods that work in nurturing these range of skills, including whole-school, whole-class and individualized approaches and methods. Lastly was the question of developing and exchanging methods and tools to assess life skills in East Africa.

The first regional meeting was held in Nairobi in July 2017, which also inaugurated life skills as a learning cluster. The second regional convening was held in Dar es salaam in June 2018, which concretized the learning agenda on values and life skills, including developing concrete work plans on what country teams should do and learn. Since then, each country has been engaged in various activities of seeking, doing and learning. The civil society actors are engaged in identifying skills that they have in focus, packaging and sharing with peers.


The proposed CIES panel seeks to represent the African voice in educating for the 21st century voice. Three RELI partners will share their approaches, experiences and learnings. Foremost, ZiziAfrique (Kenya) will share the story of involving education sector players in Kenya to define and map basic competences for the technical and vocational education (TVET). This paper will show how a participatory process identified, negotiated and arrived at two frameworks for transferrable and non-transferrable skills, covering 11 skills areas and a priority of around 40 skills. The paper will move on to compare the skills identified in Kenya, with those mapped in Uganda and in Tanzania, giving it a regional outlook.

The second paper will focus on the experience of the Luigi Institute of Higher Education in presents the results of a study that investigated the inhibitive elements of national examinations to 21st century education in Uganda. This paper argues that examinations drive teachers to focus on the rote elements of the curriculum, and institutionalize deliberate avoidance of critical life skills in education.

The third presentation by Educate! Uganda takes us into the classroom, to experience the ‘skills lab’ method that mediates different life skills integrated within academic subjects. This paper presents a unique argument, that life skills are instructed through both content and method (process). To make a case for an integrated approach, Educate! shares their experiences of life skills acquisition through this method in a normal classroom, as generated from more than 700 secondary schools in Uganda.

This panel therefore offers good contribution to the conference theme of education for sustainability. The tensions contemplated in the perspectives of these three papers are instructive, and may raise big interest among the global fraternity of actors working on 21st century skills. The three papers straddle the three key questions of concepts, methods and assessments that now occupy larger space in global education.

The panel will be opened by the chair with a quick overview of the RELI initiative in East Africa, and complete the session by introducing the three presenters. The applied research study on skills frameworks will be presented, followed by the study results from Uganda, and the integrated approach experiences on instructing life skills. These three presentations will take around 50 minutes in total, leaving around 30 minutes for engagement with the panel participants.

Sub Unit

Chair

Presenter

Individual Presentations

Discussant